Digital Cloning

It's The Future. Do We Even Need Real Actors In Movies Anymore?

In 1945, the French film theorist André Bazin wrote that “cinema [had] not yet been invented.” This wasn’t true, of course — at least not technically. The moving image was invented half a century earlier, first by Thomas Edison with his Kinetoscope and then later perfected by the French brothers Louis and August Lumière with their cinematograph in 1895. But Bazin was referring to what he called the “myth of a total cinema,” which existed “only in the imaginations of a few men in the 19th Century.”

In Bazin’s view, every technological advancement in the medium since 1895 — deep focus, sound, color — has “paradoxically” taken the art form closer to its origins. In other words, cinema started with an ideal that filmmakers have been striving to achieve ever since. “In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality,” he wrote, “the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world.”

But it’s an illusion that ages fast. Photography, wrote Bazin, “embalms time,” imbuing it with a certain “phantomlike” quality, the “disturbing presence of lives halted.” Cinema goes a step further, by embalming action, the passage of time. But it’s still embalmed. Old films look old for a reason — classic film actors are phantoms of another era, frozen in celluloid, like your parents in their hazy, yellowed wedding footage, dressed in the costumes of their time.

With Debevec’s invention, that all becomes immaterial: An actor can be scanned at age 30 and continue to play 30-year-old characters until the end of days. This leaves us not with phantoms, but something even eerier: digital clones that look, talk, and act just like the actors they resemble, but with no subjectivities, no senses of self. Indeed, no souls.

And that may be where The Congress and reality part ways. In that film, even the soul can be cloned, marketed, and sold: “We want to scan you — all of you,” says a studio executive (played with smarmy aplomb by a toothy Danny Huston) to Ms. Wright. “Your body, your face, your emotions, your laughter, your tears. We want to sample you, preserve you. We want to own this thing called ‘Robin Wright.’”

Then again, maybe in another 50 years, Debevec’s progeny will have devised a way to scan the soul too. After all, André Bazin, who died in 1958, surely never anticipated a 3-D clone of Laurence Olivier appearing in the 2004 sci-film film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,released 15 years after that actor’s death, let alone Audrey Hepburn, who died in 1993, appearing in a 2014 commercial for Galaxy chocolate.